Different between Amazon EC2 and a hosting website

Question

Not sure if this is the relevant forum for this question, so just let me know if it's not and I'll move this.

Could somebody go over the differences between Amazon EC2, which I understand is a product that gives you access to a computer in one of Amazon's physical hosting location, and then allows you to add any kind of software you want (like MySQL, PHPMyAdmin, host websites, etc...), while a hosting site (e.g. goDaddy, BlueHost) basically does the same thing except these hosting sites do not allow you to install whatever software you want. Is this true?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Another thing is to understand the larger goal of Amazon EC2 -- scaling. AWS makes it easy to scale-up new instances as traffic increases, then scale back down when traffic subsides.

But as to your original question, yes, you have root access to the EC2 machine. You can configure it any way you want, but you are also fully responsible for maintaining it.